Internet chat sessions, although frequently regarded as a simple social communications device, have a significant business purpose as well. These sessions allow a person, such as a customer or a potential customer, to conduct, via the Internet, a communication with a company representative (referred to below as an “agent” for brevity) so as to obtain information on a product or service, repair or replacement of a product, technical or other problems or difficulties with a product, etc. The use of the Internet allows the customer and the agent to communicate one-on-one in real time and even to exchange electronic media, such as documents, photographs, sound clips, etc., in order to assist the customer in making an informed decision or aid the customer in resolving a problem. Direct communications between the agent and the customer have been done in the past by telephone, but the parties frequently could not exchange documents while communicating with each, and the company had to bear the expense of telephone lines for that purpose. At times, many of the telephone lines were not used and so the expense was wasted, and at other times the number of lines was woefully inadequate for the volume of calls. A substantial part of this expense is, therefore, avoided when the customer and the company communicate via an Internet chat session. Further, Internet chats are more efficient in that one agent may handle multiple chats simultaneously whereas a telephone conversation requires all the agent's attention.
Problems arise when the agent finds that another agent is better suited to answer the question posed by the customer, or the customer has a question that is best handled by another company, such as an associated manufacturing company, or a partner, parent, or sibling company. At present, the agent can only tell the customer of the new URL that the customer must go to. In this case, the customer must type in the URL, or cut and paste the URL, or, at best, the message from the agent will have a hyperlink to the URL so that the customer can simply double-click on the hyperlink and be connected to the URL.
However, all of these methods require some action or actions on the part of the customer, and none of these methods conveys any information to the new agent. Thus, all of the past information is lost and the customer must begin again by describing the problem or the product involved.
Further, there are times when the server designated to handle the chat sessions may become overloaded or slow down due to the number of chat sessions or to due to other procedures which the server may have to perform. However, there is no provision for redirecting existing or potentially new chat sessions to another server.